Part 1. Act one ; Act two -- Part 2. Act three; Act four -- About the production -- Biographies of the original story team.

Summary:

As an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband, and a father, Harry Potter struggles with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs while his youngest son, Albus, finds the weight of the family legacy difficult to bear.

Summary

The Eighth Story. Nineteen Years Later.

Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany, a new play by Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series and the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage. The play will receive its world premiere in London's West End on July 30, 2016.

It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn't much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children.

While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.

Author Notes

J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling was born in Gloucestershire, U. K. on July 31, 1965. She also writes fiction novels under the name of Robert Galbraith. Rowling attended Tutshill Primary and then went on to Wyedean Comprehensive where she was made Head Girl in her final year. She received a degree in French from Exeter University. She later took some teaching classes at Moray House Teacher Training College and a teacher-training course in Manchester, England. This extensive education created a perfect foundation to spark the Harry Potter series that Rowling is renowned for.

After college, Rowling moved to London to work for Amnesty International, where she researched human rights abuses in Francophone Africa, and worked as a bilingual secretary. In 1992, Rowling quit office work to move to Portugal and teach English as a Second Language. There she met and married her husband, a Portuguese TV journalist. But the marriage dissolved soon after the birth of their daughter. It was after her stint teaching in Portugal that Rowling began to write the premise for Harry Potter. She returned to Britain and settled in Edinburgh to be near her sister, and attempted to at least finish her book, before looking for another teaching job. Rowling was working as a French teacher when her book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in June of 1997 and was an overnight sensation.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone won the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award, and received a Commended citation in the Carnegie Medal awards. She also received 8,000 pounds from the Scottish Arts Council, which contributed to the finishing touches on The Chamber of Secrets. Rowling continued on to win the Smarties Book Prize three years in a row, the only author ever to do so. At the Bologna Book Fair, Arthur Levine from Scholastic Books, bought the American rights to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the unprecedented amount of $105,000.00. The book was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for it's American release, and proceeded to top the Best Seller's lists for children's and adult books. The American edition won Best of the Year in the School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Parenting Magazine and the Cooperative Children's Book Center. It was also noted as an ALA Notable Children's Book as well as Number One on the Top Ten of ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. The Harry Potter Series consists of seven books, one for each year of the main character's attendance at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. All of the books in the series have been made into successful movies. She is number 1 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list. She has also written Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard. She won the 2016 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award. In 2016 she, along with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, published the script of the play Harry Potter and the cursed child. It became an instant bestseller.

Rowling's first novel for an adult audience,The Casual Vacancy, was published by Little Brown in September 2012. She made The New York Times Best Seller List with her title Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination. She published two bestselling fiction novels under the name of Robert Galbraith: The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm.

Horn Book Review

This "Special Rehearsal Edition Script" of the 2016 London play includes stage directions and original cast list. Harry's adolescent son Albus and best friend Scorpius Malfoy embark on a mission (using an illegal Time-Turner) to right wrongs in Harry's past. The play is most successful with its characters, indulging the audience's desire to revisit old friends while introducing a new generation of wizards. (c) Copyright 2017. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The much-anticipated return of Harry Potter is here at last, in the form of a rehearsal script for the play (a finalized script will be published later), conceived by Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany. Set 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts, the spotlight shines on a new set of wizard friends, Albus Potter (Harry and Ginny's youngest) and Scorpius Malfoy (Draco's son). A strained relationship between Harry and Albus comes to a head at the start of the young Slytherin's (yes, Slytherin!) fourth year at Hogwarts, prompting Albus' rash decision to go back in time and tamper with events at the Triwizard Tournament over 20 years ago. With a stolen Time-Turner, he and Scorpius return to the fateful tournament, but quickly learn that even slight changes to the past have enormous consequences. Only occasionally indulgent, the story explores new character relationships and several alternate (and alarming) futures once the Time-Turner comes into play. Series fans can breathe easy knowing this play has been respectfully and lovingly wrought. Tensions thrum, spells fly, and Slytherins finally have their day in the sun but at center stage, as always in the Potterverse, is the overriding importance of love and friendship, especially in the face of danger. Really, readers need only be concerned with how to get to London to see it performed. Floo powder, perhaps? HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Have you not heard of this Potter chap?--Smith, Julia Copyright 2016 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

A FRIEND ONCE told me about an infamous party she attended after the midnight launch of a mid-series Harry Potter book. A dozen people sat in a small Brooklyn apartment, reading newly purchased copies in silence. My friend was halfway through when the first reader closed her book and went to wait outside on the stoop until another reader, finished, emerged to talk about everything they had just read. The room emptied as the night wore on, the speediest readers exiting early, less zippy readers doggedly persevering. It was a night of three celebrations : first the midnight purchase, then the reading salon and, finally, the elated moment when you weren't the last reader to join the discussion on the stoop. I bought "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" around noon the day after it came out and the day before flying to Aberdeen, Scotland. I didn't even crack the spine on the overnight flight. I had concerns. What if it was like a high school reunion? Harry Potter and I were both older. What if I didn't recognize him? What if we no longer had anything in common? During the layover in Dublin, my 7-year-old daughter wrote and illustrated the 11th book in her own series (about a rat named Ratso). I sat down on a hard chair in the wrong time zone, opened my book and was instantly transported back (forward?) to the lives of characters I remember in better detail than I do my own childhood. What a remarkable thing! "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is the bar e-bones script of a play. And yet, it has the same addictive drive as Rowling's novels. Of course, this isn't Rowling's writing, but rather the playwright Jack Thorne elaborating on a story conceived by Rowling, Thorne and the director John Tiffany together. And yet, Harry Potter and Hermione and Ron and Ginny - in their actions and dialogue, their preoccupations and loyalties - remain themselves. By which, since Harry and the rest are fictional characters, I mean Thorne has by some sort of alchemy written a book that I would previously have assumed only J. K. Rowling could write. The humor is Rowling's, as is the tightrope-with-an-umbrella execution of a for mid ably complicated plot and Rowling's sturdy, pragmatic morality, where the high cost of doing the right thing is nevertheless worth paying. How can a collaboration feel so singularly tethered to Rowling's point of view? There's probably a spell for this you could learn at Hogwarts if Hogwarts really existed, but the ingredients must be rare and difficult to come by. Perhaps the qualities that make Rowling such a remarkable writer are the same ones that make a project like this possible. The world of Rowling's series is so generously furnished by her redoubtable imagination; her sense of how magic could work is so practical and everyday in its details, so fanciful in its delights. Her heroes and their friendships are easy to recognize, as are the villains who make the lives of those around them as grindingly, interminably miserable as possible. We know that they will receive their comeuppance. We know her heroes will do the right thing. The patterns of genre that Rowling inhabits must be a useful limitation for anyone working in her world, although it's still a marvel how Rowlingian (please feel free to use this neologism to describe other writers I might enjoy) Jack Thorne's approach to dialogue is. (The only difference I can spot is that his villains are just a bit more perfunctory in their awfulness. Dolores Umbridge is slightly less of a pill. The Dursleys, in Harry's nightmares, seem slightly less nightmarish than they were in life. But perhaps on the stage they are just as ghastly.) So what, then, to make of the new characters, Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy and Rose Granger-We asley? How Rowlingian, exactly, are they? Much like Harry, Ginny, Hermione, Ron and Draco, this new generation of magical children feel like real people who want ordinary things in life (good friends, small adventures, to discover what they might be capable of) but who stumble into the extraordinary. I thought they were excellent company and that they fit in just fine at Hogwarts. Harry Potter has, from the first book onward, been a communal experience. It seems appropriate that most nights a sold-out audience will literally see this new chapter come to life. Because the original story was a series, it seems appropriate that the play stretch across two performances. Because it is about time travel and how change ripples outward, it seems right that every live performance will allow the possibility of difference from the previous. There were moments where I paused in reading to think how much funnier or scarier or spectacular something must be onstage: when Harry's son, the teenage Albus, transmogrified into the adult Ron, kisses Hermione vigorously to distract her; when Snape sends forward his Patronus; a moving, menacing hedge maze that must be navigated. But on the whole I wasn't sorry to be reading the script. The act of imagining how certain scenes or effects might be achieved has its own kind of pleasurable magic and appeal. THE APPEAL of all fantasy, including Rowling's original series, comes from answering the question "What if?" What if magic existed? What if an owl delivered an invitation (to you!) to learn magic at a secret school? What if jelly beans came in every flavor, including earwax? What if you had to die to save the world? The questions of "The Cursed Child" are the ones you can ask only after a series has been wrapped up successfully and everyone has had their just deserts. What if Voldemort had a child? What if characters who died could be restored to the people who loved and missed them? What if things went differently? What if, like Dum ble dore, Harry Potter had to choose between saving an innocent life and keeping the world safe? What if we could have a chance, one last time, to see people (characters) we loved dearly? I've noticed, to my bewilderment, the question circulating of whether J. K. Rowling should have agreed to this project. What could be the case against it? That the play could dilute the accomplishment of the original series? That Rowling's readers might revolt when asked to read a script? That characters and stories best beloved by readers no longer belong to their author? What ungenerous, anxious, proscriptive lines of thinking. Here's to a long and surprising career in which J.K. Rowling continues to move in and out of the kinds of genre and collaborative projects that interest her most. Readers are free to follow her or not. In the nine years between the publication of the seventh and eighth Harry Potter books, Rowling has written a doorstopper contemporary social novel and three books of a continuing detective series, as well as a Quidditch handbook, a handful of short stories and a wizard's bestiary due shortly to appear as a movie (the script also by Rowling). Adjacent to the books she's written, there are movies; theme parks; and Pottermore, which calls itself a "digital publishing, e-commerce, entertainment and news company." Has there been any individual since Walt Disney who has had greater influence on the creative landscape? Are there any literary characters since Sherlock Holmes and Watson as beloved as Harry and Ron and Hermione? Here's to the boy who has lived into middle age and to the writer who so vividly brought him to life. Here's to reading parties where fans of this new book can choose parts and read the script aloud together, rather than going out to sit on a stoop and wait for everyone else to finish. When I arrived in Aberdeen, my 11-year-old niece Katie was, as it turned out, half-way through "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." So we had a reading party of our own. I stayed awake longer to finish (the advantage of traveling forward in timezone time). In the morning we agreed it was an excellent book. I said I wondered where Hagrid was, and Teddy Lupin, during the present-day scenes in the book. I was anxious about them. Katie said she was surprised when the Sorting Hat put Albus in Slytherin. I pointed out that in the first Harry Potter book, the Sorting Hat had debated whether to put Harry in Gryffindor or Slytherin, and Katie said, "Yes, but that was probably because Harry had a piece of Voldemort's soul in him." We agreed we would like to see the play. My 7-year-old picked up "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and read the first few pages. Then she put it down again. "Aren't you going to read it?" I asked her. "No," she said, sounding scandalized. "There are owls, and they're flying in the daylight !" KELLY LINK, a co-founder of Small Beer Press, is the author of four story collections, including "Get in Trouble."

SD_ILS:1309986

Rowling, J. K.

9781338099133

9780606384964

9781518221101

9781338216677

Rowling, J. K.,

Tiffany, John,

Thorne, Jack,

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